I got tired of wrestling with the archive thingy provided by Views and went looking for a better solution. This looks like a really solid module! Thanks for providing it. There's no README or other documentation, but no biggie. It's pretty obvious how it works.

Browsing the code, I noticed a funny comment: "I have no idea why the inserted string is wrapped in <em> tags...delete the word 'strip_tags' calls if you don't believe me." I ran into this some time ago and tracked it down... in includes/theme.inc you'll find this little function:

/**
 * Formats text for emphasized display in a placeholder inside a sentence.
 * Used automatically by t().
 *
 * @param $text
 *   The text to format (plain-text).
 * @return
 *   The formatted text (html).
 */
function theme_placeholder($text) {
  return '<em>'. check_plain($text) .'</em>';
}